Making Mistakes Marvelous

Tomas Edison, one of the greatest and most prolific inventors in human history took 10,000 attempts to create a light bulb, that's 10,000 failures, or 10,000 stepping stones to success. I am not Edison but after my first week back at school I felt like I had made 1000 mistakes, but for the first time I felt proud of them, in fact I boasted about them to my students all week.

From my own past experiences and what I have seen from past students, failure can shut down any further exploration or willingness to give it a go. Perhaps failure often instills a fear of failure. So this year I am determine to celebrate failure and turn it around from a dirty word into a positive word. So now I happily admit my every failure to my students and model how each mistake teaches me something new and provides an opportunity to improve. My catch phase this year is "count my mistakes to see how much I have learnt".  

My dream is that my students start their year of learning with a growth mindset that celebrates mistakes as learning opportunities.

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” - Robert F. Kennedy

EduCampNZ Christchurch 2014 #educampchch

I love going to EduCamps as for me they showcase what I believe a model life-long learner teacher is. These amazing teachers take a Saturday morning of their own time to share and learn from each other, to connect and collaborate. So not only was this #educampchch a wonderful learning experience but also a great chance to meet those teachers whose passion for teaching learning is an inspiration.

Below is a copy of the Smackdown slides and they were all fanatasic, but some of my favourites where:
* Kahoot (Slide 6): which allows you to run a quiz, you do however need either a connected device per student or per group.
* The Five Sentence Challenge (Slide 10): which is an online writing challenge for emergent writers.

* Coding for Teachers (Slide 18): a community of teacher learning to code together.

Smackdown Slides

I presented some of my favourite free coding sites and apps for different primary school levels.

There was also a lively Twitter backchat and sharing happening which you can view below.
Twitter Feed
  #educampchch Tweets